PhD thesis final - Royal Holloway, University of London

Chapter 6 –Grounding belonging in leisure space(Yale, who is married to a Chinese woman and has lived in Wuxi for three years)This excerpt implies that many of my respondents employ strategies, such as behavinglike a local PRC Chinese, or performing an ethnic Chinese identity, to avoid beingtreated differently (e.g. being taken advantage of or overcharged) and to ensure theirown personal safety. It is particularly advantageous for Taiwanese expatriates to do sobecause of a shared ethnicity and language, as well as a cultural understanding ofChinese society. Accordingly, I was told that by my respondents that they often playdown their Taiwanese identity and highlight their Chinese identity and cosmopolitanattributes in the public domain, to escape from PRC Chinese people‘s gaze. In doing so,they are considered to be and accepted as being ‘zi ji ren 46‘ or an insider, whichallows them to feel more at ease when interacting with the PRC locals. In this sense, thestrategy employed by Taiwanese expatriates to generate public belonging throughconcealing their ‗difference‘ from the locals, is different from the experience ofexpatriate workers posted to countries with different cultures. In those instances,expatriates attempt to forge a national sense of belonging through performing theirforeignness.In summary, the above discussion has confirmed that the milieu-bounded familiarityprovided by amenities and infrastructure in the receiving cities are imperative fortransnational migrants to feel as though they belong (see, for example, Ehrkamp 2005;Gordon 2008; Law 2001; Nowicka 2007; Huang et al. 2008). Also, my analysis furthersuggested that migrants‘ subjectivities in their practices of belonging, with specialregard to their ability to transform a given space into their comfort zone and to shifttheir identities to fit in different spatial norms, are important aspects when considering46 Meaning ‗one of the lads‘.226